Author: Dave Bonta

How to account for the continuing popularity of Jung’s crackpot theories? The “collective unconscious” is mysticism lite, and has a strong whiff of racialism about it. And no one ever prayed to an archetype.

The myth-mongers perpetuate a number of questionable assumptions, in my opinion: 1) that the main purpose of religion is to answer ultimate questions; 2) that the role of the individual storyteller in shaping religious narratives is minimal; 3) that sacred stories point inward, rather than outward; and 4) that our experience of inwardness is universal, or at least the norm.

On the contrary: 1) In actual practice, where universalizing ideologies intermingle with local traditions and everyday concerns, religion can play many different roles for many different people. Generally speaking, I think, very few people ever concern themselves with so-called ultimate questions on a regular basis. Those who do may be revered as saints and holy (wo)men, their tombs may become sites of pilgrimage, but few seek to follow their example. Instead, the great mass of believers want from saints the same sorts of things they want from their gods and ceremonies: good luck; affirmation and security; therapy; miracle cures; guidance through life crises; a sense of belonging; better stuff; inspiration; social status; etc. To posit a higher plane where the Big Questions only are permitted simply recapitulates the elitist views of the promulgators of official, institutionalized religion.

The other three generalizations I’ve identified are also colored by ethnocentric and elitist biases unsupported by ethnography. 2) Some peoples do indeed view sacred stories as received wisdom that the storyteller alters at his/her peril. But others expect and celebrate improvisation in the retelling or reenactment of divine escapades. (See examples below.) 3) The ego/environment split is no older than the Industrial Revolution. Reactions included not only the Romantic revolt but also the so-called Great Awakening, where for the first time the fate of the individual soul trumped any concern about community. Before this time, I think it is fair to say that accounting for customs, preserving a community’s sense of identity and inculcating social norms were chief among the purposes served by sacred narratives. 4) A division between inner and outer is fairly meaningless in societies where individualism is not highly stressed, and/or where what we conceive of as the environment is seen as a kind of divine rebus. The World Religions all stress inwardness, but this strikes me as less an innovation than an attempt to compensate for the loss of richness that attended the cancerous spread of hierarchical and warlike societies across the globe. For example, according to one theory, monasticism played a pivotal role in the growth of armies: a conscious attempt to rein in the bands of marauders and brigands that had always posed such a threat to the established order. The shaved head of both the soldier and the monk testify to their submission to collective order and unity.

As commerce and empires spread their monocultures of the mind (in Vandana Shiva’s evocative phrase), cultural diversity suffers. Where once the body might have been thought to harbor three or more souls, now it houses only one. Where once one’s afterlife destination(s) might have been viewed as a consequence of the circumstances of one’s death – to the extent that it was thought about at all – now it is seen as reward or punishment for the conduct of one’s life. (This points in two directions: toward the breakdown in social taboos associated with the growth of polities to a point where anonymity is possible, and toward the projection of the apparatus of the state upon the cosmos.) Local gods are abandoned or subsumed by an ever-more-remote godhead, and tricksters vanish or turn sinister. Divine possession and other forms of ecstasy are demonized or pushed to the social margins. Ritual performance becomes the monopoly of an elite few. Religious behavior becomes monotonal, a matter of high seriousness. With the growth and spread of literacy, the stories can be effectively frozen in time. The sacred text becomes a new idol. The world of nature becomes increasingly stereotyped, its revelations dismissed as illusory or worse. Eventually, even reading out loud is abandoned for the quintessentially inward experience of silent reading and study.

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Myths of the origin of humans vary widely in the Chaco, not only from tribe to tribe but from teller to teller. . . . In a Lengua account the Creator is said to have been an enormous beetle, who first caused evil spirits to come out from under the ground, then produced a man and a woman from the grains of soil he had thrown away.
John Bierhorst, The Mythology of South America (William Morrow, 1998)

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Weep Wizard, 1979:
One of the Power-People had a dream. Some say it was the first Power-Man, some say it was the Ultimo and some say Maria Castellana: one of them had a dream. They would find what they wanted in a place struck by lightning, said the dream. Well, let’s say it was Diego Poklaj: he walked along the ridge of Volcano-Volcano and on down to Volcano-Her-Children [= local toponyms]. There he was caught by a strong south whirlwind rain until he took refuge under a tree. He got soaked. A big lightning struck there and he knew it was a sign, but a sign of what he didn’t know.

In the afternoon, the sun came up and nearby where Diego Poklaj, Diego dust, had taken shelter and had his dream, there was this old, beaten up tree: a tz’ajtel tree, an old one, really cut to pieces and hacked about. Diego Poklaj looked at it and said to himself, ‘Christ! They couldn’t mean this thing, it’s a mess, it’s far too soft, it sucks!’ And he passed it by. So he heard a whistle behind him. He went back to the tree and asked, ‘What’s the big idea?’ the tree just grunted back. ‘Are you the chosen one?’ said Poklaj. The tree just grunted. So Poklaj took out his stone hatchet and chopped.

Nathaniel Tarn with Martin Prechtel, Scandals in the House of Birds: Shamans and Priests on Lake Atitilan (Marsilio, 1997)

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Abstractions do not provoke loyalty in [the Vodou priestess] Alourdes. She continues . . . to locate those individuals who can be called her people because she knows them and because they have earned the title.

But these days she casts her net more widely, and the group she includes in it is more diverse. Alourdes has always shown courage and creativity in taking on the new and the foreign. Through her, at my marriage ceremony, Danbala moved her whole community to a broader response to the question, Who are my people? This may be the way of the future for Vodou in the immigrant communities. But such a path leads to both gains and losses. Vodou can share its wisdom and its healing techniques with a larger and more varied group; but as the group of potential devotees expands, the spirits will also become more universalizable, the faces of the spirits less transparent to those of the ancestors, and the stories that carry the wisdom of the religion more abstract.

Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (University of California Press, 1991)
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See also That old-time religion, Cat’s cradle and It’s art, dammit!

Everyone knows the first line; here’s the whole poem. This is #466 in R.W. Franklin (The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, Harvard/Belknap Press, 1999).

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

1862 was a banner year for St. Emily. She wrote the magnificent “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” and immediately afterwards a poem whose last couple of lines deserve equal renown (#373):

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul –

#413 is probably too abstract and explicit to rise to the level of these others, but is valuable precisely because it lays bare one of her central themes:

Heaven is so far of the mind
That were the Mind dissolved –
The Site – of it – by Architect
Could not again be proved –

‘Tis Vast – as our Capacity –
As fair – as our idea –
To Him of adequate desire
No further ’tis, than Here –
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Cross-reference: Poem # 910

“Magnified tenfold, the complexity and detail of a single snowflake took me completely by surprise. How could something as small and ordinary as snow be so perfectly beautiful? I couldn’t stop looking. Even now, I remember the sense of possibility, of mystery that accompanied that first glimpse. For the first time, but not the last, I had the sense that there was more to the world than immediately meets the eye. I looked out at the snow falling softly on the branches and rooftops with a new understanding, that every drift was made up of a universe of starry crystals. I was dazzled by what seemed a secret knowledge of snow. The lens and the snowflake were an awakening, the beginning of seeing.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (Oregon State U.P., 2003)

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“A Cheyenne elder of my acquaintance once told me that the best way to find something is not to go looking for it. This is a hard concept for a scientist. But he said to watch out of the corner of your eye, open to possibility, and what you seek will be revealed. The revelation of suddenly seeing what I was blind to only moments before is a sublime experience for me. I can revisit those moments and still feel the surge of expansion. The boundaries between my world and the world of another being get pushed back with sudden clarity, an experience both humbling and joyful.

“The sensation of sudden visual awareness is produced in part by the formation of a ‘search image’ in the brain. In a complex visual landscape, the brain initially registers all the incoming data, without critical evaluation . . . Not until [a] pattern is repeated, with feedback from the conscious mind, do we know what we are seeing. It is in this way that animals become skilled detectors of their prey, by differentiating complex visual patterns into the particular configuration that means food.”

Ibid.

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“For most travelers the face of the tropical rain forest appears surprisingly monotonous, especially when experienced in the flat light of mid-day. . . Even the most highly trained botanists are humbled by the immense diversity of the Amazonian forests. Confronted with the unknown, they collect specimens and do their best to identify a plant to family or genus. Only later, in the comfort of the herbarium and invariably with the assistance of a colleague specializing in that particular group of plants, will they figure out the species and obtain a complete determination.

“In other words, most botanists working in the Amazon must come to peace with their ignorance. When they look at the forest, their eyes fall first on what is known and then seek what is unknown. [Richard Evans] Schultes was the opposite. He possessed what scientists call the taxonomic eye, an inherent capacity to detect variation at a glance. When he looked at the forest, his eye fell reflexively on what was novel or unusual. And since he was so familiar with the flora, he could be confident that if a plant was new to him, it was new to science. For Schultes such moments of discovery were transcendent. He was once in a small plane that took off from a dirt runway, brushed against the canopy of the forest, and very nearly crashed. A colleague who was with him recalled years later that throughout the entire episode Schultes had sat calmly by a window, oblivious to the screams of terrified passengers. It turned out that he had spotted a tree, a new species of Cecropia, and had scarcely noticed the crisis.”

Wade Davis, One River (Simon and Schuster, 1996)

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“To those whose sole need is to get from here to there, superhighways are a boon. In truth, without their aid it is doubtful we could have seen, in a single season, all the varied aspects of winter across the continent. Yet they are part of a present paradox: the more the land is traversed, the less it is seen. Year by year, the jet airlines fly higher, passenger cars on superhighways go faster. One shows the land as a distant map unrolling, the other as a landscape blurring by. Both remove us from contact. I remember Wilbur Shaw, three times winner of the Indianapolis 500-mile race, once saying to me: ‘The faster you go, the farther you have to look ahead.’ I remembered John Muir, in the California mountains, protesting that nothing could be seen at the rate of forty miles a day.”

Edwin Way Teale, Wandering Through Winter (Dodd Mead, 1957)

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“Knowing the wildflowers, naming all the birds without a gun, these are admirable attainments. But there is always a residue of sadness when we learn the name and lose the wonder of the living thing itself.

“We become specialists and our interests shrink. . . . In all times, the appreciator has had to have his excuses ready. Different times, different excuses. A century ago, it was looking for a moral lesson. Today, it may be a hunt for ecological significance. But, in this speeding modern world, an increasing number of people are realizing that just to stop, just to enjoy nature, has its own significance.”

Ibid.

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“Inspired by the writings of such naturalists, I began college with a biology major. But I eventually realized I had little affinity for the kind of science I encountered there, with its emphasis on quantified data, controlled experiments, technological monitoring devices, and theoretical analysis. Because I was unable to comprehend and appreciate this work, I felt incapable of understanding what really mattered about nature. But I found a refuge in anthropology, where the descriptive method had persisted like an orphan child, and where the study of Native cultures revealed traditions of natural history that seemed richer than anything accessible in Western science . . .

“Among the Koyukon people . . . elders like Sarah Stevens and Grandpa William carried their vast and insightful knowledge of the natural world with great humility. I never heard them speak of how much they knew, but of how little, and of how much there was to learn, how difficult it was to understand even the smallest mysteries around them. Anthropologists working among traditional peoples are often told they have learned very little about the culture they’ve come to study, even after their research has gone on for many years. Unfortunately, the rocks, plants, and animals are unable to give the same appraisal to those who study them, although its humbling influence might be of great benefit.”

Richard Nelson, The Island Within (Random House, 1989)

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[A] rapidly evolving science recently labeled ‘biomimicry’ studies nature as a source of wisdom that can teach us everything from how to clean up industrial messes to how to create adhesives that hold their grip underwater. Harvard geneticist Dr. Richard Lewontin notes, ‘The one point I think all evolutionary biologists are agreed upon [is that] it is virtually impossible to do a better job than an organism is [already] doing in its own environment.’ . . .

“The unique lens structure of lobster eyes, for example, has inspired the design of a new type of telescope . . . Termite nests in arid regions are being studied because of an ingenious design that allows maximum circulation of air entering from the outside, keeping the nest cool. These nests could conceivably lead us to more efficient air conditioning . . . And the incredibly lightweight yet strong and efficient limbs of insects and other arthropods are helping us improve the designs of everything from industrial cranes to artificial limbs.”

Mark J. Plotkin, Medicine Quest (Viking, 2000)

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“Now the umialiks [= skin boat owners] were in taboo. They moved slowly. They were grave. The village was silent. No one talked to the umialiks. No one sang or worked on equipment.

“Four days the umialiks sat. They thought about the whales they would catch. They thought, and they saw them. It was frightening and sacred.

“And now the umialiks told their families to open their caches. ‘Feed the old people, poor people and orphans!’ The umialiks were generous. Their meat stores were opened. The more they gave, the more whales would come and lend their bodies.”

Tom Lowenstein, Ancient Land, Sacred Whale: The Inuit Hunt and its Rituals (FSG, 1993)

The alert reader of yesterday’s post may have noticed a logical inconsistency big enough to drive a freight train through. The opening scenario dealt primarily with HIV-1, yet in the second scenario, the evil dude is clearly concerned about either another, more virulent virus or perhaps a number of diseases acting in concert, analogous to the introduction of Old World diseases to the New World in the 16th and 17th centuries. O.K., so perhaps he alters his genes so that his descendents would be immune to all these diseases. But that deprives us of the neat, binary opposition of a single savior vs. anti-savior. And it isn’t at all clear to me that a retrovirus could be transmitted in any way other than through sex or the mixing of blood. The really virulent ones are lytic viruses like Ebola, for which vaccinations could probably be developed.

So the concept would need a lot of work before it could be shaped up well enough for a novel. (Probably could still form the basis of a workable movie script at this point – Hollywood producers have never let glaring inconsistencies and implausibilities get in the way of high drama and pathos!) Additional complexity would actually help in the layering of meaning, I think.

As I pondered the novelistic possibilities in the shower this morning, I realized I would want it to be narrated in the twin voice of a woman with two heads. There actually is such a young woman somewhere in Britain, I believe. Both heads are fully functional, and are treated by everyone as two separate persons. Each has her own ambitions. The way I understand it, the town conspires to keep her identity secret (along with its own identity). This was something I read in a legitimate news source, not a tabloid.

In any case, the legal, theological and romantic implications of a human being with two, fully functional heads are interesting. It would be fun to place her in a culture where twins are revered. As a narrator, she would speak ordinarily as two sisters, sometimes bickering, sometimes finishing each other’s sentences. We could have each head studying different languages, or one head performing simultaneous translations for the other, etc. During moments of heightened awareness, she/they would speak as one in a distinctly hair-raising manner, like the plural voice of God in Shoenberg’s Moses and Aaron.

Mind you, I don’t see myself writing this novel. No, I envision a co-authorship between Barbara Kingsolver and Orson Scott Card. That’s the kind of artistic partnership that could lead either to prophetic vision or to mutually assured destruction. Maybe both!

The Savior will be born somewhere in East Africa, most likely. He may already have been born; we have no way of knowing. In fact, chances are he will live and die unknown to the outside world – which is to say, the world of scientists, far-away governments, pharmaceutical companies and the international press. Within a wide circle of towns and villages, however, he may be fairly well known, though unrecognized as anything special. Most people will profess to hate him, but enough will love him to spread his unique and invaluable form of resistance throughout the region – and eventually around the world.

A few things we can know for certain. His sex and sexual orientation: a male heterosexual. His character: to be an effective savior, he will have to be at least moderately promiscuous. The more sex partners he has, the better it will be for the survival of humankind. So we know the type, yes? Or we think we do. Amoral and narcissistic, possibly even to the extent of being what psychologists call a psychopath or sociopath: an individual who is apparently constitutionally incapable of experiencing true empathy. Far from the anti-social ax murderers of the popular imagination, true psychopaths are much more likely to be extremely charismatic. They seem friendly and likeable – and why not? They are not burdened by the kinds of doubts and insecurities that haunt the rest of us, the 95% of people who worry about how they are perceived and actively imagine what others around them might be feeling. Many successful leaders are psychopaths: positions of power in most societies select for the very traits they possess in spades. Some psychologists speculate that power is the only real compensation for the emptiness that psychopaths say they habitually experience.

Of course, the Savior could turn out to be a relatively ordinary guy who likes having sex with a lot of different women. I am simply discussing probabilities. I should mention that there will need to be more than one of him. In fact, humanity will need a different savior for every deadly viral infection in the coming shit-storm of plagues that will likely kill between 80 and 90 percent of the human population: around 80 percent from outright infection, the remainder from circumstances related to the breakdown in social and political infrastructure. Mortality will be highest in the so-called developed world, where populations are densest and where citizens are most highly dependent on complex food, water and energy transport systems.

How does a species evolve resistance against a retrovirus like HIV-1? First, let’s recall how a retrovirus works. Basically, it tricks a cell into fusing with it, then, once inside, adds its own DNA to that of its host. Ordinary viruses employ the more direct method of conquer, pillage, destroy. Vaccines work on them because – unlike retroviruses – they don’t corrupt and disable the T cells needed for successful counterinsurgency by the host’s immune system. Vaccination – simply injecting a weakened form of the HIV-1 virus in hopes of strengthening the body’s defenses – is unlikely to work against AIDS. Retroviruses are simply too devious in their subversion of the immune system.

Some 30 million years ago, our primate ancestors survived a similar retroviral Armageddon. The details are unclear, but a record of sorts has been preserved right in our DNA. Roughly eight percent of the human genome, it seems, is of viral origin. The computer analogy is helpful: these are strands of code that have long ago been disabled by the removal of key parts that enabled their reproduction. They exist harmlessly in every cell in our bodies, including the hard drive – our germ cells. Right in the DNA of the sperm and the egg.

Actually, it is possible that these lines of code still perform some useful function, in blocking similar codes from re-infecting us. But 30 million years is a long time, and the new retroviruses are too different for this legacy to be of much use. Its presence does serve as a reminder of what the body is capable of, however.

Studies of a colony of mice in a barn in California back in the late 1980s provide clues about what may have happened, and what will need to happen again. When a team of pathologists from UC-Davis discovered the colony, it was in the throes of an especially virulent retrovirus that was being transmitted to infants as they nursed. But a small segment of the population had developed immunity, and the researchers quickly identified the genetic fix this group possessed. A single mutation in a single mouse had passed into the germ cells; the small group of survivors were its offspring.

Organisms, fortunately, are not very much like computers. We are not really “programmed” – much less “hard-wired” – by our DNA, because much of what happens in our development from one moment to the next, from fertilization onward, is guided by what the scientist can only describe as random chance. (Religious people may conceptualize it differently, of course. In fact, their conceptualizations are not only not “wrong,” but possibly highly useful in helping the mind/body fight off infections – at least from garden-variety viruses or fungal and bacterial infections. Sometimes even cancers. But probably not the most powerful retro- and lytic viruses.)

Mutations are one particularly important form of change introduced through random chance. Although the vast majority of mutations have negligible effects within a population, and some are highly disadvantageous (sickle-cell anemia, babies born with two heads), a low level of mutation is essential to the preservation of life on earth. A damaged or incomplete HIV-1 provirus (the DNA version of retroviral RNA) should eventually arise. It may arise more than once, but chances are it will arise soonest and spread most quickly in that part of the world currently most devastated by AIDS: East Africa. It will work, pathologists feel, by reproducing just the viral proteins that form receptor sites on the surfaces of host cells, without making copies of the RNA for intercellular travel and infection.

Viruses are a lot like multinational corporations: they aren’t really living organisms, but they act like they are. They are obligate parasites that possess merely a set of detailed instructions, a template for their replication. Unlike true life forms, all the energy and material necessary for their reproduction must come from elsewhere – from their unwilling hosts. Unlike a predator, they cannot be said either to love or to hate their prey. One doubts, in fact, that they possess any form of sentience whatsoever. They seem deathless, machine-like – immortal.

But just like corporations, they are fiercely competitive. Retroviruses, once established in a host cell, engineer it to make enough receptor-binding proteins to completely fill the receptors on the surface. Thus, new invaders will have nowhere to dock, no port of entry. If a mutation produces a defective copy of the retroviral DNA capable of locking out the original and all others like it, the host cells will be saved. If those cells include sperm or egg cells, the offspring of the parent organism will inherit an immunity to infection by the retrovirus. This is what happened among the mice in California and presumably among our primate ancestors as well.

Could such a mutation be manufactured in the laboratory and simply injected into AIDS patients? Perhaps. An article in the February 2004 issue of Natural History, “Fighting HIV with HIV,” by T. V. Rajan – my source for of most of this information – explores the possibility in detail. As Rajan envisions it, though, the procedure would be complex, high-risk, and hellishly expensive. Given the political and economic near-impossibility of providing the currently effective drug treatment to sufferers in the impoverished regions of the world where AIDS has the most impact, it is difficult to share the author’s enthusiasm for this treatment. And even if “present technical limitations” can be overcome, the treatment would rely on bone marrow stem cell inoculation. Only regular body cells, not germ cells, would be involved. Intentionally altering the human genome is considered beyond the pale – which is not to say, I suppose, that it couldn’t or won’t be done.

One can imagine a scenario quite different from our opening one in which “saviors” unwittingly originate successful mutant competitors with HIV-1, HIV-2 and other retroviruses soon to spread, through various means, among the grievously over-concentrated and over-consuming human population. In this alternate scenario, a fabulously rich individual – perhaps a psychopath also – himself becomes infected. He decides to break the unwritten rule and employs teams of molecular biologists and genetic engineers not merely to administer the stem-cell inoculation therapy on himself, but to insert a defective copy of the retrovirus into his own sperm cells. Much of humanity will die, he calculates, but everyone with my genetic material will survive. My genes, he thinks: mini me. The Master Race!

But he must be careful. Other powerful people, other amoral heirs to ill-gotten corporate wealth may be plotting something similar. Therefore he must also finance a world-wide network of agents to hunt down and eliminate the competition. He studies the history of past epidemics, like the Black Death of 14th-century Europe, and realizes that the retroviral Armageddon will only provide a brief breathing space, maybe a century or two. A narrow window of opportunity for his descendents to cement their control over increasingly scarce fossil fuels and other non-renewables. They will have the will to such power, of course, because they will be – many of them – just like him. But for those who might be a little soft, who might be tempted to share, he will have to create some social mechanism capable of inculcating his values and outlasting the centuries. A new religion . . .

Call it a fable, call it science fiction. I am only playing with possibilities, based on very limited knowledge. But if a hundred years of occasionally prescient futuristic stories and novels have taught us anything, it is that humans are not very good at anticipating the unforeseen. Most “realistic” scenarios are simply extrapolations from current technology, and become prescient in hindsight through a combination of blind luck – random chance – and strong insights into human nature. I’ll have to leave it up to the reader, then, to decide how well my guesses might approximate real human outcomes.

That there exist individuals sufficiently amoral for all of this we should not doubt. That neither one of my hypothesized characters would know of the other is also likely: they move, after all, in parallel worlds with little meaningful contact by virtue of the very bonds of extreme dominance and servitude that unite them. Being a mushy headed, religious-when-it-isn’t-too-demanding kind of guy, I like to imagine the Savior not in fact as a psychopath but as a good guy, deep down. Someone who actually, really likes women – a lot. And who is attractive to them not through an air of dangerous power but due to his fundamentally empathetic nature. It seems as least as likely as the alternative.

The second guy – he’s evil. He probably does sinister things, like have all his offspring marked at birth in some special, secret way that will allow them to recognize each other in later life as the Chosen. He will have an Achilles’ heel: his own arrogance will make him blind to the possibility that Nature is bigger, wiser and more powerful than all humanity put together. The priesthood he spawns won’t realize until it is way too late that their semi-mythical progenitor had competition, and that this competitor, by spreading copies of his superior resistance all over the place – for free! – has won the day.

But that’s why he, and not the evil rich guy, is the Savior. He will not, of course, benefit personally from the innovation in his genes. In fact, his body will likely be so riddled with the disease that his own life – and the lives of most if not all of his partners – will be incandescently brief. That’s why he needs to be so promiscuous in order to succeed at the unknown task that Fate has marked out for him.

As an afterthought, it seems to me that in the long run, for a social animal, selfishness and power-lust are just not advantageous traits. That’s why they’re relatively scarce in their pure form. Love, empathy, and the capacity to truly enjoy lots and lots of sex: these are advantageous traits. You can deride the bearers of such traits all you want: call them arty-fartsy, call them yellow, call them meek. But in the end it is they, and not you, who will inherit the earth.